Sociolinguistics: Aspects of Accents
Mgr. Pavel Čanecký
Brno, 22nd October 2021

DEFINITION OF BASIC TERMS
•1. The roads are dirty.
•vs
•2. The roads is mucky.
•
•

DEFINITION OF BASIC TERMS
•Accent
•pronunciation
•Dialect
•syntax, morphology, lexicon and pronunciation
•Idiolect
•from the Greek idio- meaning “one’s own” and –lect
•the specific way that a single person speaks
•"[A person's idiolect is] not just vocabulary; it's everything from how we pronounce certain words
to how we put them together to what we imagine they mean. Ever have a disagreement with someone
over whether an ambiguously-shaded object was actually blue or green? Congratulations, you've
witnessed differences in idiolect.... „
•(Gretchen McCulloch)

TRADITIONAL DIALECT
•a coherent alternative language variety
•found in various parts of England
•not so common outside the British Isles
•Newfoundland and the Appalachians
•relexification
•primary vs secondary dialect features

GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATION
•Accents as powerful indicators of geographical identity
•Socially distinct: vulgar vs posh
•Geographically distinct: Scottish accent, Australian accent, southern accent, American accent,…
•regionality
•RP vs GenAm
•urban vs rural
•geographical diffusion (Trudgill)
•

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLASS
•Speech stratification correlates with social stratification
•

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLASS
•William Labov
•The Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966)
•-> Variability in a New York accent is socially stratified
•

AGE
•Innovations in the speech of children and adolescents
•mouse -> mouses
•thin /f/
•

STYLES AND ROLES
•social context
•casual style (CS)
•formal style (FS)
•reading-passage style (RPS)
•word-list style (WLS)
•

STYLES AND ROLES
•Labov-hypercorrection


PROJECTING AN IMAGE
•convergence x divergence